Ambiguity intolerance was first introduced to the psychology discipline by the work of Else Frenkel-Brunswik and Theodor W. Adorno
(1949) which hypothesized it to be an aspect of the authoritarian personality. It refers to the “tendency to
perceive or interpret information marked by vague, incomplete, fragmented, multiple, probable,
unstructured, uncertain, inconsistent, contrary, contradictory, or unclear meanings as actual or
potential sources of psychological discomfort or threat” (Norton, 1975) In other words, it is the
“way an individual (or group) perceives and processes information about ambiguous situations
or stimuli” (Furnham and Ribchester, 1995)